King County Landmarks: Black Diamond Cemetery

Address: Cemetery Hill Road, Black Diamond. This community cemetery was established in the 1880s on a hilltop site at the edge of the thriving mining town of Black Diamond, then the biggest settlement in King County outside of Seattle. The cemetery is a complex cultural landscape, capturing the tremendous ethnic diversity of the town’s early history, in the surnames of those buried there, as well as in the languages, religious and fraternal organization affiliations, and styles of the grave markers.

The cultural traditions and legacies of the area’s early immigrants, including Welsh, English, Italian, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Austrian, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Polish, Russian, and others represented here as they are in few if any other sites still preserved in the town, with the loss of fraternal and social halls, and other community facilities once associated with these groups, and with Black Diamond’s early social history.